


Familiar Stars

by Araine



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-14
Updated: 2011-07-14
Packaged: 2017-10-21 09:13:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/223534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Araine/pseuds/Araine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A typical wizardry for Darryl isn't typical in the slightest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Familiar Stars

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to the inimitable Reading Redhead, who beta-ed this for me. I've always wanted to write a Darryl story that deals with his wizardry and his autism, and I hope I've succeeded.

There’s a clearing that Darryl likes, not far from Niagara. The trees open up in a pattern that looks like a lopsided diamond, and unless it’s high noon the sun shines through the foliage to tint everything green and soft gold. Leaves – mostly old – blanket the ground; but Darryl’s made peace with the trees and tries not to ruin their artwork.

He lies on his back in the middle of the clearing, hands clasped behind his head. Sometimes, especially in the spring, it’s muddy; his hands and the back of his jacket end up coated in dirt, and he has to use a quick wizardry to clean everything up.

In the summer, he closes his eyes and lets the heat sink into his skin.

\--

Darryl doesn’t leave Earth much. He doesn’t know why, really: most everyone wizard he’s met has gone off-worlding at least once, and many of them recommend it. You’ve never seen waves until you’ve seen 300-foot waves of methane, the three-headed Valtons are hilarious (when they’re not trying to eat you), and the Crossings has some of the best blue food in the galaxy.

Darryl just smiles facetiously at them, and shrugs his shoulders. “Maybe sometime,” he says.

He’s not sure why, but he’s never been further than Eris. There, he could still find Orion’s three-starred belt: the brightest of the Milky Way, a line across the horizon that seared his eyes to look at, even as it cascaded into darkness beyond. Out there, standing on the very lip of the Sol system, the immensity beyond pressed in on him.

It was the effervescent quiet of entropy that he’d felt: the universe expanding outward forever to end everything with its enormity.

Darryl returned from that trip, clambered into bed and pulled his covers so close into his body an observer might have thought him Batman-skinned. He began to rock like he did when he was younger, back and forth and back and forth, pulling himself in from the vastness.

After that trip, even Mars sometimes seemed too far.

\--

The cats at Grand Central like Darryl. He can check the connection between two gates at the same time, which makes him useful, and he understands them in little ways.

“You’re very cattish, for a human,” Urruah tells him once, as Darryl feeds him scraps from his baloney sandwich.

“What do you mean?”

Urruah’s tail twitches in a gesture of mixed mirth and annoyance. “You understand the proper way to do things. You don’t do most of them the proper way, but you understand the way they’re supposed to work. Like territory.”

Darryl takes a large bite out of his sandwich. “I like the way I do things.”

“Well,” Urruah says, “you’re only human.”

The cat snatches the baloney out of Darryl’s fingers. His tongue scrapes against the boy’s fingertips, tickling them, and Darryl laughs and jerks his hand back. Urruah purrs; he already has the baloney.

Later, Carl comments on it. “You gonna learn Ailurin, kid?”

Darryl thinks about this remark for a moment. “The cats would probably like that,” he says.

Carl claps Darryl on the shoulder, the kind of unconscious physicality that – though genial – still always startles Darryl. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I never figured it out, and they like me well enough. I think.”

“Well,” Darryl says, “you’re good with gating.”

Carl laughs and it makes his moustache waver. “I suppose so. You are too, you know, with that extra Darryl you’ve got hanging around.” He rakes one hand across his brow and through silvering hair, and he smiles, tempered as it is by a worry at the edge of his lips. “You could probably take over for me, some day.”

The idea of taking over Carl’s job, working on worldgates, fascinates Darryl for a moment. A dream reality blinks into existence, and then disappears.

“No, I don’t think so,” Darryl says. “Too much off-worlding for me.”

Carl gives him a Look. It’s the one that Darryl has come to expect from adults; as though he is considering something very deeply, something that he will not tell Darryl and that Darryl should not ask about.

“That’s good,” Carl says. It seems like strange word choice, but then he smiles and the consideration eases from his brow. “That’s a good idea. Go with what feels right, that’s really the only way to figure out what your specialty is going to be.”

Darryl runs one hand through his coarse wire curls; his eyes flicker up towards Carl. “Do wizards have to have a specialty? Are there wizards who are—jacks of all trades?”

Carl shrugs, considering. “Most wizards develop one naturally,” he says. “Like I said, do what feels right. Don’t worry about it too much.”

\--

His mother gives Darryl the go-ahead to travel to the city by himself, and he plans a day out. The record store is where he really wants to go: he can get all of the music online, sure, but there’s an atmosphere in the city.

He pays his fare and boards the bus. His headphones are pressed into his ears, but Darryl’s concentration isn’t on his music.

As he passes, he looks over his fellow passengers. An old man, sitting straight-backed at the front of the bus, worn baseball cap flattening his nearly-white hair. A young blonde woman resting her hand on a baby stroller; her darker-hued companion sits beside her, a dragon tattoo prowling her shoulders. A middle-aged woman wearing a hijab, with lines pressed into the corners of her mouth, her bag neatly propped up against her legs. A man with straying brown hair leans against the bus window, the sallow skin around his eyelids bruised by lack of sleep. A lone student leaning against her backpack, painted pink nails pressed against the cover of her book, eyes intent on her studying. A group of boys – not much older than Darryl – sits at the back of the bus, conversing amongst themselves.

Darryl grins a wide-toothed grin, and takes his seat.

Not everybody notices. The woman in the hijab smiles back, the lines at the corners of her mouth turning into dimples. The young mother nods to him, her eyes crinkling. The sallow-skinned man grins back open-mouthed.

Darryl takes his seat.

Sometimes, wizardry is simple.

\--

In the autumn each leaf in Darryl’s clearing is painted with fire, the wind turning the forests into a leaping blaze of reds and golds, the sudden change in color spreading faster than any forest blaze.

In the winter each bough is bent heavy with snow, the burning leaves long since dropped. The trees creak with the weight of ten thousand crystals, the air sparkling with the spectrum of a thousand more when the sun shines through the air just right.

At night, the moon turns the snow silver-blue or silver-red; every leaf is hoary-edged; and the hundred-million stars mirror the hundred-million diamond facets of the snow beneath his feet. Here, he can see the stars clearly: the Milky Way is a thin white trail of falling snow, with Orion’s famous stars three twinkling snowman’s buttons.

He smiles.

Out here, Darryl is never cold. He brings his coat, mostly because he should. But autumn winds and winter snows are never cold.

The earth hums and whispers beneath him, and when he listens, he can hear her speak.

Sometimes, Darryl talks back.


End file.
